CFB Week 1 Grades

Team can play well and lose, or poorly and win. In order to see beyond the score to determine how a team performed fundamentally, we score a team’s performance in each game relative to all games played in the last ten years, accounting for opponent strength. With this tool we can objectively see which wins were most impressive, which losses most surprising, which teams luckiest, which games sloppiest, and more. The percentile rating can be interpreted as the probability that the team would have beaten an ‘average’ opponent on a neutral field based on how it played from a perspective of the stats that matter predictively. ‘Score Diff’ is the same concept, but scaled in expected score differential vs. an average opponent on a neutral field.

Before getting out of the way and letting the chart do the talking, I’ll note a few things that stuck out to me when I went through it:

Biggest surprise at the top of the list is most certainly Army, with the 5th-best performance of Week 1. The big driver of this was their play success. Being able to get 7 yards per play every play is much better than 14 yards one play and none the next.

There are a number of games where the losing team played a ‘fundamentally’ better game than the losing team. The most surprising would have to be Oklahoma/Houston. If you thought that the win over Oklahoma would move Houston up our ratings in a hurry, think again. Both teams had comparable play values (which measures plays in terms of expected drive points added), and Houston was obviously more efficient with their scoring (a missed FG returned for a TD will do that), but where Oklahoma really shined and Houston really struggled was play success. Oklahoma ranked in the 71st percentile in offensive play success, while Houston was in the 28th percentile. Houston got themselves into a lot of 2nd- and 3rd-and-longs, and were fortunate enough to convert more than expected with ‘chunk’ plays.

Cade will be happy to know that while Texas went to overtime to beat Notre Dame, they were almost 6 points better fundamentally.

Appalachian State turned in a much better performance than Tennessee, outperforming them fundamentally by almost 12 points.

Florida State/Ole Miss was a very evenly matched game, and the only game where both teams had top-20 performances.

Alabama was off the charts good, a full nine points better than the second-best team. In short, they would have convincingly beaten any team they played.

There are many other useful nuggets in here, so feel free to explore the chart (and even re-print it if you wish, but please credit Massey-Peabody Analytics).

Rufus Peabody is a sports analyst and professional sports bettor, currently traveling the world on Remote Year. He is a 2008 graduate of Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on inefficiencies in the baseball betting market. Mr. Peabody was previously ESPN's 'predictive analytics expert' and many, many years ago got his start in the industry working as a statistical analyst for Las Vegas Sports Consultants.